life came into strong focus – since they shared family and political experiences. My parents were related to each other: My mother’s father and my father were first cousins, and both my mother and father had been active in the liberation struggle in South Africa from the 1940s. As she reflected on my father’s life, my mother began to record her own life in parallel.
My father’s book was published in 2002. In August of that very year, my mother had a second stroke which changed our lives. She was paralysed on the left side, confined to a wheelchair and required 24-hour nursing care until her death in 2010. However, she did not let that deter her and she lived most of those eight years with her trademark feisty passion. The first year and a half were the most difficult as she and we adjusted – yet she journeyed to India some five months after the stroke to receive an award from India’s president. She continued her engagement with the Concerned Citizens Group in Chatsworth, addressed gatherings, challenged injustice and went on marches throughout these years.
Reading and writing were made more difficult following her stroke, but in 2006 my mother resumed writing on her life, with the help of Ramesh Harcharan, who had worked with her at the Institute for Black Research, with great dedication, for two decades. She dictated her thoughts to two typists to assist with the writing process.
I first saw pages of my mother’s autobiography around 2007 on one of my regular visits from Johannesburg to her home in Durban. I was charmed by the little girl who when asked by her mothers to bring three or four pieces of wood for the cooking fire, pondered on whether she should bring three or four, and then decided to bring seven, since three and four make seven! I was enchanted at her first memory of a patterned linoleum under a bed fringed with lace and moved by the strength of the young girl who, when run over by a car, did not tell her mothers for fear of their punishment. I was in awe of the schoolgirl who fundraised for flood victims and who gave her first political speech and led a march aged seventeen.
I said to my mother that there was sufficient material to publish. Even if the narrative was well developed only up to the end of the 1960s, other published autobiographies did not deal with the entire life of the person. Since Ramesh was now no longer working with her, I offered to help with revising her memories as she dictated these to me and to assist with the structure and reordering of her memories. I spent some weeks in 2007 and 2008 working with my mother. My niece Nadia spent a week reading pages to her and revising as she dictated. To help my mother to read the pages as we worked through the manuscript, we printed the text in a superlarge font. By 2008, the narrative up to the 1960s was sufficiently well developed and I left this with my mother to look through and finalise.
While I felt this could be published, my mother still seemed uncertain. She agreed that I could make contact with a publisher, but she did not make any headway on finalising the script. Each time I asked she would say that Ramesh had some pages “in his computer” that he was to still to bring to her. It seemed to me she was not keen on finalising and I did not want to push her on this. Feeling her hesitation made me waver.
My mother passed away in 2010 after a final stroke that debilitated her so that she was unable to speak in the last two weeks of her life.
Many months after her death and up to October 2011, I returned to these pages and worked on them as time allowed in between my own work. I checked facts, edited, worked on family trees, a family glossary, on making the section on our ancestors more readable (the complicated family history being difficult even for a family member to get one’s head around!). I stopped working on the manuscript in October 2011 as life and work intervened, and I resumed reviewing her notes in 2015.
The first part of the book recounts her family history and the arrival of the Meers in South Africa. The next two sections outline in beautiful detail the everyday experiences of a child growing into a young girl and into a woman within a large and mostly loving family, told against the backdrop of the political struggles of the times. The final part covers the period from the 1970s onwards and is somewhat sketchy as my mother did not write as detailed an account of these years. I have added to the fragments of her writings of this period by drawing from her book Prison Diary One Hundred and Thirteen Days 1976 (Kwela, 2001).
Looking back, I think it was my mother’s concern that her book was incomplete that led to her hesitation in finalising the manuscript. It was a concern she seemed to have felt when working on my father’s autobiography, for she writes in her introductory note to that autobiography, fitting words:
No biography or autobiography is a complete record. It is an abstract from the entirety, and so is this autobiography.
This book paints a picture of my mother’s life. It tells a coming-of-age story of a young girl and political activist in a significant time in our country’s history and makes an important contribution to the memory of our country’s collective past.
Shamim Meer
2016
I
A PART OF ME
The Family of My Birth
CHAPTER 1
India to South Africa
Ours was an unusual family – with two mothers, Ma and Amina Ma, and one father, our Papa. We were nine children, six brothers and three sisters – Ma’s four (Ismail, Solly, Ahmed and Gorie) and Amina Ma’s five (including me, Bhai, Siddiek, Farouk, and Razia). We children discovered that two mothers were better than one. They complemented each other.
The grandparents I knew were Ma’s and Papa’s parents. I never saw them, but we were told about them so often that they were in my memory – a part of me. I never knew anything at all about Amina Ma’s parents or grandparents. The only person from Amina Ma’s birth family I knew was her brother Cassim, and he was a floating presence, drifting in and out of our lives.
Ma and Papa were first cousins. They came from the lineage of Ahmed Asmaljee Meer, the grandfather they shared. The earliest Meer patriarch that can be traced is Ahmed Asmaljee Meer’s great-grandfather Cassim Meer, who lived in the village of Garah in Gujarat in a time when the British East India Company had entrenched itself in India as a military–cum–political force.
The British imposition of taxes on farmers and produce had reduced peasants, including the Meers, to landlessness. Having lost their land and all their possessions to the local moneylender, Cassim’s grandson, Asmaljee Meer (Ahmed Asmaljee Meer’s father), was forced to migrate with his family from their village to the city of Surat. By 1860, Asmaljee Meer’s two sons were established in Surat, eking out a living as telis (oil pressers).
It has never been explained why Asmaljee Meer named both his sons Ahmed. He differentiated between the two by adding the suffix ‘jee’, after the one son’s name. Since ‘jee’ is a term of respect, one assumes that Ahmedjee Asmaljee Meer was the elder and Ma and Papa’s grandfather, Ahmed Asmaljee Meer, the younger.
Ahmed Asmaljee’s first wife, Maryam Bana of Tadkeshwar (a town not far from the city of Surat), died when their son Suleiman was about seven years old. Following her death, Ahmed Asmaljee married Sarah Amin also originally from Garah. Sarah Amin was the mother of the three Meer patriarchs who would migrate to South Africa – Mohamed (Ma’s father), Ismail (Papa’s father) and Chota (my husband Ismail’s father).
Suleiman, Ahmed Asmaljee’s son from his first wife, never came to South Africa, though his son, Cassim, the father of YC Meer and MC Meer did. He became a successful businessman in Dundee and was close to his uncles.
